Macos – ps aux status column meaning

bashmacosps

On a Mac, 64 bit, osx 10.8.5, two of my ps aux output lines, plus the header, are ; 

$ ps aux | head
USER          PID  %CPU %MEM      VSZ    RSS   TT  STAT STARTED      TIME COMMAND
myuid       16402   0.0  0.0  2432768    600 s005  R+    9:57PM   0:00.00 grep mongo
myuid       16071   0.0  0.1  3045380  20036 s001  S+   10:13PM   0:00.51 mongo --nodb

I cannot find any documentation on the STAT, status, column. What do the items mean and/or how can I research this further?

Things that didn't help;
Wikipedia ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ps_%28Unix%29
Another poster on a similar question here got no replies; https://superuser.com/questions/723080/linuxfedora-what-does-these-stats-column-mean-for-ps-aux-command

Best Answer

from a linux system (man ps):

           D    uninterruptible sleep (usually IO)
           R    running or runnable (on run queue)
           S    interruptible sleep (waiting for an event to complete)
           T    stopped by job control signal
           t    stopped by debugger during the tracing
           W    paging (not valid since the 2.6.xx kernel)
           X    dead (should never be seen)
           Z    defunct ("zombie") process, terminated but not reaped by its parent

in addition:

           <    high-priority (not nice to other users)
           N    low-priority (nice to other users)
           L    has pages locked into memory (for real-time and custom IO)
           s    is a session leader
           l    is multi-threaded (using CLONE_THREAD, like NPTL pthreads do)
           +    is in the foreground process group
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